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Touch plays a vital role in maintaining human relationships through social and emotional communication. The proposed haptic display prototype generates stimuli in vibrotactile and thermal modalities toward simulating social touch cues between remote users. High-dimensional spatiotemporal vibrotactile-thermal (vibrothermal) patterns were evaluated with ten participants. The device can be wirelessly operated to enable remote communication. In the future, such patterns can be used to richly simulate social touch cues. A research study was conducted in two parts: first, the identification accuracy of vibrothermal patterns was explored; and second, the relatability of vibrothermal patterns to social touch experienced during social interactions was evaluated. Results revealed that while complex patterns were difficult to identify, simpler patterns, such as SINGLE TAP and HOLD, were highly identifiable and highly relatable to social touch cues. Directional patterns were less identifiable and less relatable to the social touch cues experienced during social interaction. 

Emotional response to haptic stimuli is a widely researched topic, but the combination of vibrotactile and thermal stimuli requires more attention. The purpose of this study is to investigate emotional response to vibrothermal stimulation by combining spatiotemporal vibrotactile stimulus with dynamic thermal stimulus (hot or cold). The vibrotactile and thermal stimuli were produced using the Haptic Chair and the Embr wave thermal bracelet, respectively. The results show that spatiotemporal vibrotactile patterns and their duration, and dynamic thermal stimulation, have an independent effect on the emotional response. Increasing duration generally increases the valence and arousal of emotional response. Shifting the dynamic temperature from cold to hot generally decreases the valence of emotional response but has no significant effect on arousal. Nevertheless, certain spatiotemporal patterns do exhibit unique responses to changes in dynamic temperature, although no interaction effects were found. The results show the potential of designing affective haptic interfaces using multimodal vibrothermal feedback.